Child Development Are Learned Or Innate

A major debate in the field of child cognitive development is whether certain aspects of development are learned or innate. It is a continuation of the classic dispute between the nature vs nurture elements of development. The chapter and articles delve into this debate with visual and auditory perception in children and provides empirical evidence towards whether or not infants are born with the ability to detect and distinguish these perceptions. There is a large consensus that perceptual functioning in children reaches adult like levels fairly quickly during the first year of development Siegler (2005). Thus, recent research has focused on how early a child can detect and distinguish different perceptual stimuli to further our understanding

Infants are thought to first learn in terms of lines and angles and subsequently they put together these stimuli to form objects. Later on, children learn to infer object properties and how to interact with such objects. Another perspective suggests that perceptual understanding is innate, and that evolution enables infants to be born with these perceptual abilities to ensure survival of our species. In terms of pattern vision in newborn infants, empiricists suggest that infants have little to no pattern vision or attention to complex patterns during their first few weeks of birth because the need for visual learning. Along the same lines, the optimal complexity theory suggests that preferred complexity level starts with simple patterns in early weeks and later shifts to more complex patterns as information-processing capacity increases. This theory suggests that preferences for solidity, depth, and complexity develops along the scale of postnatal age, highlighting the concept that environmental factors influence perceptual development (Fantx & Fagan,

Furthermore, it is important to note that when a child is born their visual and auditory areas of the brain are not full developed. For example, as the visual cortex and subcortical visual structures mature, children’s scanning patterns changes, thus allowing children to pay more attention to outlines of objects, faces, and eyes. The question is, how much of these attentional differences is accounted by cortical and auditory maturation and how much of this is accounted by interactions with the environment? I believe it is a combination of both, however when it comes to perception there is a large body of evidence to suggest a particular innateness towards perception. We are born with the biological building blocks to perceive and attend to the outside world. Perhaps visual and auditory perception starts as an innate concept, but as the brain matures, so does attention to detail. I do believe that interaction with the environment helps facilitate learning and adds to our understanding of how to manipulate the world around us. However, the initial perception of stimuli seems to largely be an innate construct that develops over